nature and love demanded. They stood as statues, and we, barely breathing, completed the courtyard tableau.
Chapter XIII
56 - 55 BCE Winter, Rome
Year of the consulship of
Cn. Cornelius Lentulus Marcellinus and L. Marcius Philippus
It was past the sixth hour of the night. The family had retired over an hour ago. Publius’ homecoming meal had been simple enough: bacon-wrapped chicken, steamed mullet and flat bread. By comparison, the feast to mark the celebration of his return to Rome was a Herculean task: 200 guests including senior senators, both optimates and populares, entertainments and a menu which must be provisioned and prepared in only five days, on the third day before the Ides of Ianuarius, between the festivals of the Agonalia and the Carmentalia. None of the preparation could be started until now, not even the invitations, for fear of spoiling the surprise of Publius’ return.
I sat on a stool at one of the two long work tables in the kitchen, oil lamps casting slats of shadow and light through the pile of wax tablets on my left, one for each runner. Our six house scribes had their own work—in the morning I would have Curio send men throughout the city to wait while the invitations were printed by copyists-for-hire so that the scrolls could be delivered by mid-afternoon. Before me blurred a list Nicoteles had handed to me when I sent the bleary-eyed cook to bed. Nicoteles was talented, but I missed our old cook, Atticus, who had died at the venerable age of 59.
I perused Nicoteles’ inventory of items not already in store which would be required for the celebration’s menu, and it was not funny in the least:
500 dormice
6 boars
10 lambs
300 wheels of bread
10 gallons of garum (in addition to the three gallons of the fish sauce we always kept on hand)
5 large amphorae of honey
5 more of olive oil
3 baskets of almonds and 8 of fresh figs
All that and a veritable field of salad greens and vegetables.
Enough! I could look upon the interminable list no longer. Taking the weights from the scroll I watched it curl upon itself like the capital of an Ionic column turned on its head. The short lines of the missing items, in itself a poem of excess, gulled my reluctant attention back to the rash and idiotic blunder I had committed only hours before in a moment of irretrievable optimism.
After the servants had been fed, I had summoned Hanno to my tablinum. There I had instructed him, before he retired to the servants’ quarters, to deliver two scraps of parchment to the medical clinic at the front of the estate where Livia made her bed. The same bed where her mother, Sabina, had slept before her. He scooped them off my table with his customary technique of interlocking the remaining fingers of both hands to hold them securely. Then off he loped, may Hermes pluck the feather from his one good heel! I had changed my mind the moment he disappeared, but the hour would not allow me to call for him in a voice much louder than a whisper. He was gone, and with him, the middle ground above despair and below elation which I had so carefully constructed, then inhabited ever since Livia’s return to Rome.
They were little poems, gods defend me! Insignificant scraps of nothing that would destroy the modicum of harmony I had gingerly pieced together after years of misgiving, awkwardness and distance. Yes, I had kissed her on the massage table, but two months had passed since that impulsive moment, and curse my ignorance and innocence, I was more flustered and unsure now than ever I was before. I did not know how to approach her without feeling ridiculous, and having a hundred household duties as excuses, I had employed virtually every single one to avoid her.
Her rejection of me was imminent, of this I was certain. She would come to me with sad, green eyes, take my hand (this time in sympathy, not in fear), and tell me how much my friendship meant to her. Playing the scene in my head made me want to regurgitate.
Who is the greatest poetess of love, beguiling hearts down through the centuries? Sappho, as any schoolboy knows. Any schoolboy, it would seem, could teach me more of this art of the interplay between the sexes than I have gleaned from my paltry experience. (Not that I would take the advice of a pimpled coagulation of base impulses.) All that I know of